Session Description

Join us for a hands-on session of exploring critical thinking skills tied to TSHA's Texas History Day Theme - Innovation. Walk away with strategies ready to implement in your 3rd-5th grade classroom tomorrow. We will also explore how to tie these strategies to your Texas History Day projects, if applicable.  

This session will take participants through the life of Tom Lea using Google Earth. It will include an introduction to the free curriculum offered by the Tom Lea Institute. Participants will learn how Google Earth can be used to bring any topic to life for students.

Social studies educators do more than teach students about the people and events that shaped Texas. They help students understand leadership, civic responsibility, and their own role in their communities. This session explores how educators can recognize students who demonstrate those qualities in their everyday actions.

Participants will learn how the Lone Star Leader Award recognizes students who demonstrate leadership, academic success, and involvement in their schools and communities. Using Texas history, government, and civic experiences as a foundation, the session will explore how students can move from learning about Texas leaders and the decisions that shaped the state to reflecting on their own leadership and responsibility to their communities.

What happens when students have to make sense of history before they know how the story ends?

This interactive session introduces outcome-blind historical inquiry, an instructional model designed to reduce hindsight bias and strengthen students’ use of evidence, causal reasoning, and decision-making. Participants will experience a historical event as students would—receiving information in stages, making predictions, weighing competing explanations, and revising conclusions as new evidence appears.

The session will also share findings from classroom-based research examining how students respond to uncertainty, contradictory evidence, and incomplete information. Participants will leave with a practical framework for creating outcome-blind investigations that can be adapted across multiple eras and grade levels.

Rather than asking students only, “Why did this happen?”, this approach challenges them to ask:

“Given what was known at the time, what would you have concluded—and how sure would you have been?”

This module will provide a broad overview of the economic realities of socialism and communism. The module will address issues specific to nations, households, firms, or industries with an emphasis on the role of markets or lack thereof. Topics discussed will include household and firm behavior, demand and supply, government intervention, market structures, and the efficient allocation of resources. The topics on socialism/communism from the module will embrace a short history; several problems: knowledge, incentive and control; and why this is relevant today. This module will meet many of today’s TEKS but seeks to also address the parameters sought out by the Texas Legislature as suggested for inclusion to Social Studies curriculums for the future.